How to Blow Up a Watermelon

Here's your nightly math! Just 5 quick minutes of number fun for kids and parents at home. Read a cool fun fact, followed by math riddles at different levels so everyone can jump in. Your kids will love you for it.

How to Blow Up a Watermelon

One of the coolest, juiciest summer treats is watermelon. This giant fruit grows out of a flower on a plant, so it’s actually a berry. You may have tried watermelon, but we bet you’ve never tried to make one explode. Crazy Russian Hacker and his brother strapped lots and lots of rubber bands around a watermelon. Eventually the rubber bands squeezed the watermelon so tightly that they crushed it. This video shows the guys nervously strapping the rubber bands onto the waiting watermelon. Watch to see the explosion in slow motion — and the cool rubber band ball it makes at the end!

Wee ones: Find 3 green things in your room, and line them up from smallest to biggest.

Little kids: If your watermelon slice has 7 seeds and your friend’s slice has 9 seeds, whose has more seeds? Bonus: If you’ve just strapped the 12th rubber band onto your watermelon, what number rubber band comes next?

Big kids: If the guys just strapped on the 60th rubber band, what number band came 3 bands before that one? Bonus: The world’s record-breaking watermelon weighed 350 pounds. How much more than you does it weigh?

About the Author

Laura Bilodeau Overdeck is founder and president of Bedtime Math Foundation. Her goal is to make math as playful for kids as it was for her when she was a child. Her mom had Laura baking while still in diapers, and her dad had her using power tools at a very unsafe age, measuring lengths, widths and angles in the process. Armed with this early love of numbers, Laura went on to get a BA in astrophysics from Princeton University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business; she continues to star-gaze today. Laura’s other interests include her three lively children, chocolate, extreme vehicles, and Lego Mindstorms.